SOURCE: Excerpt from "Dedicatory Letter to Erasmus's Edition of St. Jerome" in Collected Works of Erasmus, Vol. 61, edited and translated by James F. Brady and John C. Olin, University of Toronto Press, 1992, pp. 4-14.

In the following excerpt, written in 1516, Erasmus evaluates the historical importance of Jerome's writings and describes the difficulties he had in restoring Jerome's corrupt texts.

… [Now if] honour was paid even to works of superstition like the books of Numa and the Sibyl, or to volumes of human history as was customary in Egypt, or to those that enshrined some part of human wisdom such as the works of Plato and Aristotle, how much more appropriate that Christian princes and bishops should do likewise by preserving the writings of men inspired by the Holy Spirit, who have left us not so much books as sacred oracles! And yet somehow it happened that in that...